This chapter centers Mother India (1927), a tendentiously titled “investigative report” on Indian public health published in the interwar era. In a period, when new liberal notions of international health were being forged, Mother India displays a retrograde, much darker humor even as it participates in the broader postwar discourse on universal health pointed at the uplift of the nonwestern world. Although focused primarily on India as a “world-menace,” Mayo’s report occupies multiple scales—city, colony, nation, empire, globe—and ranges across many discursive parameters. A complex and problematic performance, this controversial screed’s warnings about biological threats emanating from India usefully illuminates the interwar historical conjuncture made up of contending blocs of nations, ideologies, and forces. Of these, the imperative to sustain Anglo-American imperial domination, even force, in the colonial world emerges quite clearly and it is the domain of health that grounds Mayo’s often lethal polemic, turning her Mother India into indisputable evidence of the toxicity of the imperial pharmakon after the Great War. In this interwar moment of imperial cultural exhaustion, also, importantly, of anti-colonial agitation, the book clarifies the uses of “medicine” and public health discourse for a political theology based on enmity—indeed on enmity as a form of remedy applied to errant bodies en masse. The book’s vituperative rhetoric contra Indian self-rule ostensibly rests on investigation of the sanitary fall out of the Indianization of municipal governance, a central theme in Rudyard Kipling, Mayo’s literary muse. The effect of liberal imperialism’s weak stance, Indianization simply exacerbates the subcontinent’s “naturally” insanitary and diseased life, stemming from the degenerate Hindu body engendered by centuries of perverse sexual and gender arrangements, irrational dietary, health, excretory, and economic choices Mayo’s book tirelessly elaborates. Specifically, in undermining nationalists’ claims to self-rule, the book tethers women and other others of Hindu nationalism—religious minorities, lower castes, and animals—to its imperialist apologetics, shrewdly aware of the rhetorical force of allegations about the treatment of women and animals on audiences potentially sympathetic to Gandhi’s India and its claims of political self-determination. Animal bodies especially become part of the book’s loaded arsenal of shaming rhetoric, as does the Abrahamic figure of the “internationalist,” meat-eating Muslim imagined as bulwark against the Hindu nationalist vegetarian. A “walking menagerie of parasites,” the latter’s unfit body constitutes the true global threat for which Mother India compounds a pharmakon of shame and enforcement as a last line of treatment or final solution that will take ‘care’ of the biologically degenerate enemy.

Incontinent Subcontinent: Nations Must be Defended

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发表日期：

2025年

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Sandhya Shetty

摘要

This chapter centers Mother India (1927), a tendentiously titled “investigative report” on Indian public health published in the interwar era. In a period, when new liberal notions of international health were being forged, Mother India displays a retrograde, much darker humor even as it participates in the broader postwar discourse on universal health pointed at the uplift of the nonwestern world. Although focused primarily on India as a “world-menace,” Mayo’s report occupies multiple scales—city, colony, nation, empire, globe—and ranges across many discursive parameters. A complex and problematic performance, this controversial screed’s warnings about biological threats emanating from India usefully illuminates the interwar historical conjuncture made up of contending blocs of nations, ideologies, and forces. Of these, the imperative to sustain Anglo-American imperial domination, even force, in the colonial world emerges quite clearly and it is the domain of health that grounds Mayo’s often lethal polemic, turning her Mother India into indisputable evidence of the toxicity of the imperial pharmakon after the Great War. In this interwar moment of imperial cultural exhaustion, also, importantly, of anti-colonial agitation, the book clarifies the uses of “medicine” and public health discourse for a political theology based on enmity—indeed on enmity as a form of remedy applied to errant bodies en masse. The book’s vituperative rhetoric contra Indian self-rule ostensibly rests on investigation of the sanitary fall out of the Indianization of municipal governance, a central theme in Rudyard Kipling, Mayo’s literary muse. The effect of liberal imperialism’s weak stance, Indianization simply exacerbates the subcontinent’s “naturally” insanitary and diseased life, stemming from the degenerate Hindu body engendered by centuries of perverse sexual and gender arrangements, irrational dietary, health, excretory, and economic choices Mayo’s book tirelessly elaborates. Specifically, in undermining nationalists’ claims to self-rule, the book tethers women and other others of Hindu nationalism—religious minorities, lower castes, and animals—to its imperialist apologetics, shrewdly aware of the rhetorical force of allegations about the treatment of women and animals on audiences potentially sympathetic to Gandhi’s India and its claims of political self-determination. Animal bodies especially become part of the book’s loaded arsenal of shaming rhetoric, as does the Abrahamic figure of the “internationalist,” meat-eating Muslim imagined as bulwark against the Hindu nationalist vegetarian. A “walking menagerie of parasites,” the latter’s unfit body constitutes the true global threat for which Mother India compounds a pharmakon of shame and enforcement as a last line of treatment or final solution that will take ‘care’ of the biologically degenerate enemy.